PROMETHEUS pre-release discussion. - Page 13

True.

 

Anyway, xenomorphs refer to aliens in general, so it's quite logical that they've dealt with nonhuman lifeforms before.

Yep, along with the redneckish "bug hunt" comments.  Honestly, there is PLENTY of room to maneuver about in this universe if they decide to keep making installments in the franchise.

My opinion on what the trailer might mean and from what Ridley's said in the past.

 

He stated there is a focus on evolution, terraforming and world building from a cosmically huge standpoint. I think it will ultimately mean this:

 

The jockeys terraform on a planetary and evolutionary level, however they are not humanoid and we don't really see them at all (the head on the table in the trailer is just part of an adaptive bio-organic suit meant to be worn during spaceflight that bonds with the ship, the user, and the gun chair). They create an environment suitable for their life and then evolve lifeforms on it that relate to them on a genetic level. However this only accomplishes part of the process, to create a fully built colony for them to arrive (if they are travelling at sub light speeds, then this could take hundreds if not thousands of years) they need a controllable work force. So they use protomolecules/nanomachines/retroviruses/biology-changing-macguffins to restructure advanced enough lifeforms (what's in the vase things) and essentially create half-jockey hybrids that do their bidding and set everything up for when they arrive. The ship is functionally nothing but a trick to lure in intelligent life forms to infect them, hence the giant humanoid head.

 

Or (an extension of that idea). They set a species down an specific evolutionary path which involves incorporating elements of Jockey DNA thus making them succeptable to Jockey Biology morphing macguffin, lure them them to the ship, infect them and take them over. And fly the ship back to their home world to infect the rest of the planet and use the ship to terraform the planet to the jockey's preferences. (the hybrids would also be super adaptable which is probably why the thing in the trailer doesn't need to wear a helmet.)

 

So what I think will go down:

 

Humans find a jockey relic on Earth with a signal that guides them to the alien planet. Prometheus goes there to investigate (with Weyland Yutani using this effort to sneak in and steal a bit of extraterrestrial tech for themselves). They find the upright standing ship, seemingly abandoned and investigate. They find the vase and the guy gets infected. So they take a vase back to the ship and the android starts researching it. Infected guy starts turning into a jockey hybrid. Rapace's character figures out what's really going on but its too late and jockey hybrid guy escapes. He starts wreaking havoc not only with the Prometheus but with the planet himself, trying to kill all that oppose him.

 

The characters try to respond by using the same tech against the jockey hybrid man as well as violence, which because they aren't looking at the big picture, either get infected themselves or wiped out because they won't pay attention to the small details and factors that would otherwise save their lives. Someone attempts to create a parasitic lifeform based on the mutating macguffin (I'm going to go with Fassbender on this one) that will kill the jockey hybrid or just starts mucking with ultra advanced tech with no real understand what they're doing, in the alien ship but doesn't seem to succeed. Jockey hybrid makes an escape (with jockey suit on) with alien ship and bring it to earth. However something goes horribly wrong in the ensuing fight/flight because the jockey hybrid isn't developed enough to use the gun chair. Horrible things happen and the ship and it either completely destroys the environment, turning it into LV 426 or goes wildly off course and lands on lv 426 ( what I think will actually happen.) The new lifeform ultimately ends up becoming the xenomorph we know and love and while we never see it we do see the vases generate organic replacements in the form of the eggs and the face hugger, thus explaining its visual simularity to Jockey tech and it ability to incorporate and adapt to its Host's DNA).

 

Theron and Rapace and possibly Fassbender are the only ones who escape but Theron has become obsessed and insane with the alien tech and procuring it for human use and Fassbender becomes obsessed with finding his creation, W-Y as a front (who may gain a god complex because he, an artificial lifeform, has created a life that he views as perfect and better than his creators and is a progenitor/father to Ash who holds the same belief system, and Bishop who does admire it but can do his own thing), leading into Alien, Ash and the Nostromo. Rapace becomes focused on following a trail of breadcrumbs back to the real jockeys and uncovering what they really are (with tangents back to the Original Alien which might keep on as a subplot for Theron's across the new franchise), and through that mankind's greater purpose becoming the primary narrative focus of any sequels. The story and the stories of any possible sequels will go on the tangent of finding the Jockeys with Vickers and Rapace and how their feuding ways are representations of science versus industry and religion (knowledge vs. exploitation and commercialization, open and free discovery vs. research with an agenda and faith and belief vs. Fanatacism and Narrowmindedness)

 

So basically, this is the Quartermass Experiment in space (not a bad thing because I loved both the BBC and Hammer versions but though their execution could better... and in space)

Edited by Bugsport - 12/22/11 at 11:01pm

The "Bug Hunt" comment also hints that they've fought actual insectoid creatures. A la Starship Troopers, which was a heavy influence.

 

Either that or Hudson was just talking out of his ass, and well, we all know that he was full of shit.

I think "bug hunt" would just be general derogatory term for non-human, probably hostile, aliens.

It's weird though, I always got the impression that while they'd "hunted", it was always a wild goosechase.

Do they ever actually use the term "alien" in the series? Or is it always referred to as 'organism/xenomorph/creature..'

I'm excluding AvP from this. I honestly can't think of them calling it an 'alien' but I'm sure someone does at some point.

I don't know, I felt that they used it disdainfully because these are highly trained marines sent out to kill the local wildlife.  Probably feel like they're above that sort of thing.

Yes. In Alien3 Ripley asks Bishop "Was there an alien omboard?".

indeed she did.  Cheers.

Is it me, or does the scaring on the Big Face look like the scaring of the guy who gets hit with the acid?

 

 

 

 

 

I think all are correct to a certain degree.  The more I consider it, the impression I'm getting is that they HAVE been set loose to exterminate alien organisms in the past, but never anything that was a true challenge.

 

"Is this going to be a stand-up fight, sir, or another bug hunt?"

 

Hudson actually appears to be asking a legitimate question here, as opposed to fucking around.  The tone is basically, "should I actually pay attention to the shit you are all spouting off or am I just going to be blowing away creatures that have no chance of killing me?"

 

Naturally, pretty much the entire platoon automatically assumes the latter (which again points to being in similar scenarios in the past) and pays the ultimate price for it.  I can easily imagine squads of them being sent to exterminate beasties on par with some of the alien wildlife we have seen in Predators or Starship Troopers-style "bugs" or possibly even Avatar-esque natives with pointy sticks.

 

Honestly, if they had ALL (including the XOs) done their homework before hand, they definitely would have stood a FAR better chance at handling the situation on LV-426.  Once again though, nobody would listen to Ripley...

 

In retrospect, when thinking about the opening of Aliens, you have the scene where to just cover a few feet, the salvage team send in a remote drone while they wait outside. We've just seen the smartest guys in the entire movie. You'd think the marines could have done that from a remote location to check out the cooling tower where the colonists were (or preferably from orbit) instead of going themselves. If the signal wasn't good enough, a synthetic or two would have been safer (and ultimately much more cost effective).

 

I know it would have made for a much less interesting and shorter movie though, just for starters.

Loving the thread so far; its amazing how this film has generated so much talk and thought.

As for me, Im abiding by the theory that the Space Jockeys created life on earth, but that it was an accident and now humanity has reached a point were its a threat to their creators, and the aliens are the failsafe, a biological weapon designed to rely on its prey as hosts to thrive and expand; so "Prometheus" is the origin of "Alien"; we wont see any "Aliens", but we will see how the "Alien" came to be.

Also, im betting my ass that the distress/warning signal the Nostromo caught is triggered at the end of this film.

 

Im not sure, Weyland Yutani suits would probably rank "Colonial Marine Cannon Fodder" far less expensive than a syntethic or a remote drone:

 

Exec: So, why dont we just send  a couple of synths and some drones to the site?

Exec2: Nah, not cost-effective; lets just send some cheap marine cannon fodder to do recon; its not like there's a shortage of those, plus, we can get tax returns on this being a military operation.

CEO: You're getting a bonus!

 

Considering the moral fibre of Burke in the film, i see this scenario as plausible.

 

 

I believe the giant guy is Phil Martin...Who is 7-foot tall...

 

[url]http://www.willowmanagement.co.uk/profile.html?p_name=Phill%20Martin&p_id=83[/url]

 

In the above he is credited of having worked on Prometheus as 'Engineer'...

 

And for shitz'n'gigglez...

 

 

Compare!

 

Gotta say, if this guy is for real and not some elaborate form of dis-information...I'm gonna have to totally change the way I've viewed this Universe.

 

...and I KINDA like it!

Edited by Graham - 12/23/11 at 7:10am

Wasn't it anchored just outside the doors, though? As I recall, it just retracts on an arm, it's not a flying or rolling "remote" drone.
 

 

 

 

As I recall. that's EXACTLY what it is...Basically a robot arm, one with a plasma torch and one with a scanner...the salvage techs probably had to change the cutter for the scanner at one point...so, more than likely, they are JUST outside the hatch...

 

 

...still admire Cameron for showing Ripley's 'grapple gun' is still wedged in there, nice eye for detail.

Yeah, I'm pretty much 99% sure that what we are seeing right here is the TRUE look of the "Space Jockeys".  After all, Ridley keeps saying that we we see in the chair in Alien is a suit (with, I'm assuming, a skeleton inside of it).  With that it mind, the Space Jockey "head" in one of the other stills is likely just an empty helmet.

I'm guessing that time travel is involved somehow. Rumor has it that WT finds some archeological evidence that suggests that mankind - indeed all lifeforms on our planet - were engineered by unknown entities, and that this evidence somehow points towards LV-428. So the Prometheus is sent off to investigate, and sadly goes through a wormhole which flicks the P. a metric shitload of years back in time. When they finally arrive, they find that there's a bunch of alien guys - Engineers - dilligently prepping LV-428 for a good ol' terraforming.

 

Needless to say, they have a bunch of very advanced bio-tools. Said bio-tools infect some of the crew because thay just can't keep their hands off them, and they turn heel. A big-ass conflict erupts when our crew learns that the Engineers are assholes who prep planets for terraforming by unleashing our old homie, the Xenomorph, upon them. As some of them are infected, this Xenomorph takes after them and looks vaguely humanoid, in this case anyway.

 

Then shit happens, and our heroes die while heroically taking the Engineer spaceship down. But it's all for naught! The last Engineer is infected by the Xenomorph, and as he dies in a very familiar chair the audience finally realizes that this end is the setup for Alien, many years later. 

 

Well, that's my guess anyway.

Why the hell would you need time travel to tell that story? You're thinking too Star Trek.

didnt Cameron say at some point that Avatar took place in between Alien and Aliens? So yeah, the planet of Pandora and all the creatures on it are already known to the Colonial Marines, not to mention whatever other planets had been discovered since.

nice find on that Phil Martin video. I really hope there Engineers are more than just silent antagonists in this film.

"Avatar" does not take place i the "Alien" universe. Whatever gave you that impression??? (other than sad fan fiction) Cameron has said no such thing.

Total Film has an interview where Charlize says her character is "the villian" in the film.

 

"She’s not believer, she’s not a scientist, she is the red tape that everyone has to go through. She’s working with the company that’s sponsoring this whole thing and you can feel she definitely has an agenda, which we pick up in the third act. She’s more quiet thunder.”
 

I think you're probably right, but wish you weren't. I loved how utterly bizarre(and Giger) they looked before, suit or no suit. Having them be giant, and kind of creepy humanoids is a bit of a let down.

Hopefully these "engineers" are another creation of some otherworldly beast.
 

 

To be honest, they look more like Mark Strong.

They're probably the Space Jockeys, but if I remember correctly, the chair for the astronauts in ALIEN is monstrously huge, which means the guy in that still there is 20+ feet tall at least. Which I suppose is going to lend itself to some cool imagery.

 

I hope the females are hotter than the males...

 

 

 

 

And the trailer? Cripes. Ticket sold (if it wasn't already). A new Batman flick, The Avengers, The Hobbit, and a Ridley Scott ALIEN (sidequel) movie? 2012 better not be the end of the world.

 

I noticed on imdb, that Patrick (Nite Owl) Wilson is playing "Cocooned Man".

OK...the only way anything Ridley Scott says that makes sense about it NOT being an A L I E N prequel (and that being true); ...yet , from what we've seen and heard in the trailer, tells everyone it actually is...can only make me draw the following conclusion.

 

REBOOT

 

Warning: Spoiler! (Click to show)

 

 

  ...this could be one of the signs of the coming apocalypse. :)

 

Quote:

REBOOTQUEL!

 

Or maybe when they say it shares DNA with ALIEN, that's actually code for "Duh... 'Nother Alien".

 

If it's correct that her character has been described as a corporate representative, even without any further description, that mere fact tends to label her right off the bat given the Company's track record so far.

 

Possible spolier...

 

 

Just an educated guess, but I would say the chances of Theron being an android are fairly high, no?  At comic-con, Scott dropped a pretty big hint that there would be a second cast member playing an android, along with Fassbender. 

 

It looks like she'll likely be the Burke of this film, so to speak.

 

One other possibility that's been kicking around in my head; Ridley teased a while back there may be more than one android on board.  If that turns out to be true, she seems like one of the more likely candidates (eta: as Kevin said while I was taking my sweet time to write this.)

 

Could be fun to see a showdown between a more reasonable, Bishop-like droid (Fassbender) and a crazed Ash-like one (Theron?)

I was thinking that could be possible. Another nice potential twist could be that she's a 'villain' in the sense that she's officious and bureaucratic, a real stickler for rules and procedure regardless of the practicality given the circumstances but we wait and wait for her to stab the rest of the crew in the back ...and that never happens. So maybe there's a chance they're setting us up in that way. Charlize Theron's statements on her character could be interpreted that way, I suppose ...

 

That was my take on her being 'a robot'...she is in fact totally human, yet can't actually operate  on an actual 'human level' due to the Company protocols she has lived by all her life.

Whilst Fassbender is a robot and is actually 'more human THAN human'...

 

Given that the corporation representative has usually proven to be untrustworthy, I was thinking they might set it up to look like she is going to be too but never have her pull a double cross.

...or maybe the ULTIMATE double cross...Fassbender BELIEVES himself to be an android/replicant/whatever and is actually only an augmented human; whilst Theron has RAM up the WAZOO*...

 

 

...*WeylandCorp Activated Zen-Space Output Oriface...

 

I'd like to ram up her wazoo knowhati'msayin...

I'm not going to link to it, but some sites have a report that they know who the villain is. I imagine it's going to make its way here sooner or later, regardless of my mentioning it, so I thought that I'd ask that any discussion be spoiler-texted about it. This could be a fruitless effort but it is the pre-release thread, afterall, and it'd still be fun to participate/speculate, if at all possible.

You mean the supposed plot synopsis that's been going around?  Because that's already been debunked.

 

The Alien and Prometheus trailer comparisons have made me angry at my young self for not buying this when I had the chance.

 

 

Was that it?

It's on io9, whatever it is.

The io9 article just mentions the Charlize Theron quote that people have been discussing on this page.

Having looked on io9 their "spoiler" has already been mentioned in this thread and seems to be based off of an interview from total film.

She's the face of the company, in comparison to the blue collar workers, that's been known for ages. She's the Ash/Burke of the film. Whats new?

Yeah, if you're talking about the "villain revealed" post from earlier today... nothing new.  Then again, that's io9 for you.

 

I'm sort of hoping that they subvert our expectations once again a la Alien, where most people were fully expecting Tom Skerrit to be the hero of the film, yet in the end, it's this unknown actress Sigourney Weaver that kicks ass and makes it out alive.  They've been pushing Noomi Rapace as the heroine/Ripley surrogate for a while now.  It would be amusing to tease that, and then kill her off relatively quickly, only to have Charlize Theron's anti-hero either save the day, or have the company ultimately "win" in the end.

 

Or hell, just let Idris Elba wind up the hero.  Idris, make me proud.  Be the first black man to make it to the end.

Yaphet Kotto was so close!

There was a fake summary floating around in which Theron's Meredith Vickers

Warning: Spoiler! (Click to show)

Some mags reported that as leaked fact. Was just fanfic from IMDB. Maybe they didn't get that and thought Theron just confirmed it.